Explaining the Business of Entertainment
Deep dives into Nielsen and other data that provide insights into streaming.
Last week, the Nielsen Top Ten lists broke new ground when Hulu had its first title earn a spot on one of the three lists. This week, Hulu doubled its performance, earning two spots! As always, caveats abound. In particular, the top films have much less “total viewership” than TV
When I sit down each week to pull data for the “Streaming Ratings Report”, it honestly feels like Easter. (Why Easter? Well, we’re closer to that than Christmas, and my eldest child is excited for candy delivered in plastic eggs.) This week, my chocolate-filled egg was a new color on
As often happens in scientific/data endeavors, sometimes you work for hours/days on a project with no results, then, all of a sudden, it comes together and you make tons of progress rapidly. And, usually, the “tons of progress” doesn’t happen without the days of drudgery. That’s what happened to me
If you read my “Who Won the Month” articles over at Decider—here, here, here, here, here or here—you’re probably wondering where one of my favorite data tools has been. That’s right, I’m talking about Google Trends data. It’s not perfect but when it works, it works wonders. And this week,
(Editor’s Note: This is the second edition of a new website feature, a weekly report on streaming ratings. One of the quirks of the streaming wars is that no one knows what shows or movies are doing well, what are doing poorly and what failed to launch. If you have
(Editor’s Note: Today, I am testing a new website feature, a weekly report on streaming ratings. One of the biggest pain points of the coverage of the streaming wars seems to be that no one knows what is doing well, what is doing poorly and, frankly, what customers want. For
Starting last August, Nielsen began releasing a weekly American top 10 most watched list for streaming video. I’ve been using it ever since. Nielsen mixed together TV and movies, and new (“originals”), second-run and library (“acquired”) titles on the same list. In their year-end top ten list, though, Nielsen flipped
Ah, for the olden days of evaluating content. In 2019, if you wanted to know, “What was the most popular film?”, you just looked at the box office and saw that the answer was (very clearly) Avengers: Endgame. Even TV was relatively simple: Game of Thrones set global records for
December was a big battle in the streaming wars. Christmas Day/end of year is becoming increasingly important to the streamers since it’s the last time to grab subscribers before annual reporting. This is why the latest installment of my “Who Won the Month” series at Decider may be the most
In 2020, Netflix lost the rights to Friends. In 2021, they lose the rights to The Office. How much do those big shows impact viewing on Netflix? Quantifying that via Netflix’s data is fairly hard, though, since they focus overwhelmingly on their original series, as that’s the key to “building